THE TIMBERWOLF | Sledgehammer of clan wolf & the greatest clan mech | Battletech lore. 

Another fun fact about the Timberwolf and the reason it is so OP, is that of all the first wave Clan machines it is the heaviest to use all four of the Clan's major weight saving techs (XL Fusion, Endo-Steel Frame, Ferro-Armor, and Double Heat Sinks.) Other heavy and assaults' Clan 'Mechs use at most two of those techs, many only have one. To the Inner Sphere, this was a 140+ Ton Assault 'Mech squeezed into a 75 Ton Heavy 'Mech sack. The only weapon on it not flat superior to the Inner Sphere stuff most people had was the machine guns on the default configuration.

As someone who was pretty unfamiliar with Battletech, the Timberwolf was what I thought of as the 'classic' Battletech mech.

Fun fact, Inner Sphere infantry contantly runied the Clans day throughout the invasion. In Battletech never underestimate infantry.

22:05 "Feel free to fight me in the comments, I will die on this hill." As a massive fan of the Madcat, it being my favorite mech visual design in *ANY* mech media. I will die along side you on this hill. The modern madcat just looks so incredibly appealing. It has a much more future millitary look to it, and just looks like it'll beat the brakes off anything smaller than itself, and most things larger.

The machine guns were added for two reasons; first being that the lack of weapons in EVERY possible slot you could put them infuriated Clan Wolfs warrior sensibilities and they considered an empty torso "wasted space", and secondly, a Jade Falcon crapped on a Timberwolf once and, after failing to kill the green parkeet with its lasers (because something that small that close in is hard to hit to begin with), the mech warrior asked to have machine guns installed so the next bird that shit on his mech could be properly Batchall'd.

Everybody knows that virtually all Clanners have said "Thank the stars I had those anti-infrantry weapons. Really saved the day." 😁

The Clan anti-Elemental weapon is the erPPC... Which is also a primary anti-mech weapon. Elementals are, uh, very scary.

Seriously, the Mad Cat was my favorite mech in every MechWarrior game I ever played. This was interesting.

The Gauss Rifle is more a coil gun than a rail gun. Harder to make, but more powerful and with far less wear and tear under use. When it comes to salvaging a Mad Cat, the first thing that always comes to mind is MechCommander. Mission 3, IIRC, has a Mad Cat near the exfiltration point. If you're careful and more than a little lucky, you can get line of sight with a Raven and pop its head with artillery (or just use all your artillery to blow it up outright and hope enough survived to avoid totaling it), or lure it onto a bridge and then blow some explosives (which auto-kills it without destroying it). If you're crazy you can even try to fight it straight up, though it's clearly placed there to be an unbeatable boss if you try to take your Inner Sphere light 'Mechs into a head-to-head battle. Regardless of how you do it, if you can manage to salvage the thing, the game is pretty much on easy mode from that point onward, even on the original difficulty (or after the updates that added a difficulty slider, Hard).

So "quick" note on the Mad Cat MK IV ("Savage Wolf"): The variant you mention in the video is essentially just a reskin of the Timberwolf D configuration with a few notable upgrades. Namely it has ferro-lamellor armor and an XXL (extra-extra-light) engine. In tabletop terms the ferro-lamellor armor is scaled down WARSHIP armor that the KEL-TEC'ish designers over in Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox decided to slap on there for shits and giggles after their last cocaine and everclear fueled bender. Said armor might be heavier than standard armor however it reduces incoming damage by 20%. Meaning a Clan ER PPC will only do 12 damage instead of 15 . It also makes the unit carrying it immune to the effects of Armor-piercing auto-cannon ammunition, Tandem Charge SRM warheads and battlemech scale taser systems. Oh, and FORGET about sandblasting the MK IV with LBX Cluster munitions as that 20% damage reduction has a minimum damage reduction of 1, so all those "little" shotgun pellets aren't going to do anything. The other fevered dream piece of tech sitting in the heart of the MK IV is the XXL engine. It might reduce the weight of the engine even beyond what an XL engine does, however they generate 10 heat per turn, make the MK IV vulnerable to side torso destruction (as they take 3 critical locations in each side torso, much like an IS XL engine does) and they make the MK IV HORRENDOUSLY expensive at 91 MILLION+ C-Bills. The MK IV is stupid, and I absolutely love it. And yes, the newest art for the Timber Wolf is the best.

The Timberwolf is by far my default OmniMech. To me it sits in the perfect optimal spot of mobility/ defence / offence.

The Timberwolf is a solid mech for sure. Playing MWO, fighting against Timbers were always sweaty. Personally my favorite clan mechs are the Hunchback IIC-A and the Mad Dog.

Inner Sphere House: I want a Mad Cat! Inner Sphere engineer: Honey, we have a Mad Cat at home The Mad Cat at home: (Rakshasa)

It is the Mech I recognize most for Battletech...

Well in Classic BT, it's actually fairly easy to salvage a Madcat, you just need a 55t bipedal mech with two hand actuators capable of running at least 85kph, then proceed to sprint into melee range and start throwing fists until two of them connect with the head destroying it completely, both of which have a 1/6 chance of hitting the head each turn, as opposed to the usual 1/36 chance.

It was the featured mech of the box art for MW2 and MW3. It enriched my childhood. Ergo: it is best mech. Wolf is best clan.

The Mad Cat has been my favorite Mech in all of Mecha since I was a little kid playing MechWarrior 2, there hasn't been a design of the Mad Cat I haven't liked (almost).

Tabletop player. I took out a madcat with a locust IIc in the 1st turn. Ran full tilt across the map. Ran right up to it. Unloaded everything into the madcat. 1 head crit. Took out the computer. Madcat is now a statue. :) my locust IIc was now an armless convertible but lived to limp away!

Timberwolf has been my #1 favorite Mech since I first started playing in the late 90s. It's nice to have something that looks cool and IS cool. Also you are not wrong about the appearance. OG Timberwolf looks sleek and beautiful for it's time, but the sleeker hardier look it has now is like finding a way to improve upon my favorite thing. I'm not mad about it

Wolverine in wolf clothing appropriate wolf plot armor. Revenge, if indirect, is sweet.

The Timber Wolf put Battletech and The Clans into a much broader awareness space when it was released by FASA. It was the poster child for 90s era Battletech. Inner Sphere players hated them and Clanners loved them.

6:00 "Clan soup stock that's just better than the other clans" oh so Clan wolf is the Ultramarines, got it

My favorite thing about the Madcat/Timberwolf is that other than the Atlas, it's one of the few iconic mech designs that FASA came up with on their own without having to appropriate someone else's IP.

Narrator: "Rearward facing SRM's" Me, a Dragonfly C (Viper) pilot, who's sole purpose is to speedily get behind anything classified as heavy or assault and drill holes in it before it knows what happened: "N... no.... that's illegal..."

The only thing really holding the Timber Wolf back in mech-on-mech combat is the arms are just a bit too low slung meaning you essentially have to brawl with it.

Sledge Hammer of the Clans and proof why logistics wins wars.

I love playing the Timberwolf in MechAssault and MA2:LW . Because I found the Gaus Rifles and Crossbows to be more effective on most maps. Plus, the ability to occasionally knock an enemy mech over can be pretty funny.

Funny, even when he's gone, I still here.....STEVE! :)

I love the use of the FTL soundtrack in this video. :) MadCat is best mech and not having a modern MW game willing to touch the clan war in a featured campaign is the real tragedy. MW6 needs to be in the Clan war era or post Clan war era.

It doesn't matter if its the OG aesthetic or the new beefier look, the silhouette of those giant racks of missiles and big arm guns standing on robot chicken legs is iconic and what drew me to the Battletech universe.

Weirdly, always preferred the Vulture (Mad Dog)--especially when it had a massive med laser barrage. I'm a sucker for medium laser barrages.

Who's "Tim Bearwolf"? OOOH, you mean a Mad Cat. The Rakshasa ain't all that bad a mech for a Marauder modified with a couple LRM 10s instead of the AC-5. The one thing the Rakshasa does show is just how OP the clans were when they first showed up. Their weapons and armor were so much lighter than the comparable inner sphere counterparts that the best the Rakshasa could do, even with the best tech the Inner Sphere could mount on it, was HALF the missile power (and none of the Clan Omnimech modularity) and lower ranges on all it's weapons systems (and even the ER large lasers could do only 80% of the damage). Even today, clan tech on your mech can nearly double its battle value. So, the best clan is still the Sea Foxes, because they're the clan dumping clan-tech weapons into inner sphere markets

To be far, Primus Myndo Waterly’s wanting to add arms to catapults wasn’t her dumbest idea. She had plenty of others that were worse. Edit - Primus is the highest rank and head of ComStar for those wondering, which makes it even more laughable some of her plans were.

I'm right there with you, I love the redesign of the Timberwolf. It looks amazing and I want one as a model for my desk.

A few of the inevitable nitpicks from one Canadian to another Reason for the MGs: Infantry do cosplay the Imperial Guard a lot of the time in Btech, but instead of using Bayonets, they use grapple hooks and Satchel charges to target to weak points of a mech (Ie. the joints and cockpit) Clan ERPPC Damage: the Clan ERPPC does 15 points of damage, which is barely less than a single ton of armor not two Jump jets: While it can mount Jump jets thank to Omnipods, it does not come stock with it MIndo Waterly: Is a female

Madcat 1s are not in production by anybody else except the wolves. But mad cats 2-4 are all stock Sea Fox products available from your local khanate.

My favorite mech until the War Crow was released, now is my second favorite and still cool as heck, not even the new fancy one with is ultraexpensive XXL engine compares with the old, reliable original Timber Wolf.

I am dissapointeed in the lack of steve.....

Had a nice custom with 4 ER LL and 2 LRM15's - worked in most of the games. Basically the best of snipers.

The machine guns are for keeping birds from crapping on clan Mechs, Aff.

Great video as always Canadian looking forward to more, also if you have heard about the setting of rifts RPG I would love to hear you talk about its unique and wacky world almost no one talks about it, and I think it would be perfect for you to talk about because of your enthusiasm and quick wit.

As a clan enjoyer i do appreciate the Timberwolf... But my true loves are the Kit Fox and Cougar. Mechwarrior Online gave me an extreme love for light mechs and my Support Fox consistently outperforms mechs three times it's tonnage.

Didn't find it under the first 10 to 20 comments... so: It is absolutely clear for people aware of Battletech lore why the MadCat switched between Catapult and Marauder. You have just to take the designs from the time where the Blood of Kerensky trilogy was published. Both mechs have gotten a redesign. So it only does not make sense anymore now!

'Madfly'. I worked at a casting (lead casting) company as 3050 was being released. No miniatures at that point. By PARTS, the 'Mad Cat' was a Catapult body, Marauder arms, and FIREFLY legs. They were a bit 'thin', which meant some extra modding with putty and/or glue, but it LOOKED almost perfect. Vulture? Swap the body for an Archer top. These were all 'redos' to cover for the lawsuit that was going on with the Robotech/Macross groups over intellectual property rights (that's right; most Battletech mechs are ROBOTECH rip-offs).

I ran a full 12 of these in modded battletech and it was insane.

the timberwolf was a wolverine design and wolf just got lucky absorbing what was left of our foundries and tech. my head canon, you can't change my mind.

Mad Cat Mk2 my favorite mech of all time, its predecessor isn't far behind

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, 40k, AND Battletech?! Yes please! 😁🤘

adding my voice to the choir of those who love the newer design: I'm a very late fan of the franchise, basically having started playing the computer game about 5-8 years ago. Throughout all my loredives and other research of the battletech lore, i would be stumped by the fanatical love for the OP Timberwolf design due to the fact that, in my mind, the anemic noodles for arms of that thing should not have been able to, A, be strong enough to support the weight of the weapons they bore and, B, not be able to stand up to even a slight sneeze from anything above a casual touch by a weaker laser. Redeeming it has been a brutal slog in my mind but it's getting there.

Rear firing weapons were more common in earlier mechs. The OG Centurion had a rear firing medium laser if I remember correctly. It fell out of favor as “wasted” weapons in most player mods

Love the Timber Wolf. I've just painted an A & C for my Clan Sea Fox Spina Khanate.

Don't you just love how this one mech has received more variants and sidegrades than literally any other mech in existence. Going up and down in size and weight, with some many different spin offs it's spin offs, got spin offs. Madcat 1 heavy, 2 assault, 3 medium, 4 heavy, and 5 assault. Each one powerful, expensive but cost effective for larger fights so long as it can bully smaller, or less mobile prey

Take a look at the original art of the catapult and marauder and they're much closer in appearance than the later remodels you show at 2:26 :)

Great vid!!! And I agree..... The new look is better

Timberwolf is my favorite mech! I mean LOOK AT IT! And yea I like all the modern redesigns over the old ones better.

Possible logical reason for the MG's. Crowd control just in case the civilians get uppity with the Warriors.

Mech assult made this my favorite mech of all time

i can definitively say what the best mech is. its my MWO nyancat. a shadowcat with dual PPCs fully utilizing the sprint and jump jets to get good positioning and hit and run with little jump jet hops over cover and popping people in the cockpit from afar. i racked up about 3 kills on average every match and several times was the last one on my team alive and still won. and im honestly pretty shit at games and was really awful at scoring those cockpit shots and still kicked heaps of ass.

Happily charges forward with the bayonet. For the Emperor.

86 kph is 55 mph, and this machine is 75 tons of well armored, properly cooled, death dealing insanity moving at these speeds. At the time of the Clan invasion the Inner Sphere would have been hard pressed to get an assault class mech (25 tons heavier) to match the firepower, or a medium to match the speed of the Timber Wolf. Much less a single mech to do both, let alone be properly cooled in order to use those weapons effectively, as well as have any mass left for armor. When Phelan Kell first encountered a Timber Wolf he mistakenly thought the mech would overheat due to the weapons fire he saw it performing. He attacked (falsely) thinking it could not have any real amount of armor after seeing it's weapons and speed. To his absolute horror he found out not only was it fast, accurate, deadly, had longer range weapons than his Wolfhound (a state of the art Inner Sphere mech) but is also had thick armor and massive cooling capacity as well. Knowing he was basically the walking dead he transmitted his sensor data and video to his unit in hopes they could escape with the information. Kell saw it as a threat not to his unit, but to the entire Inner Sphere, and knew no one would believe the stories of this mech without proof.

Mech warrior 2 made me fall in love with this bad girl. (Slaps roof) this baby can fit so many LRM-5’s

80kph is the max speed limit in Canada. Of course you can realistically go 100 to 110 depending on traffic and area but 80 Koh is the highway speed.

i know some mech designes with weapons armed backward but usually those are medium lasers and its missile boats like the archer or brawlers liket the centurion

The main functional difference between a rail gun and gauss rifle is that the rail gun pushes the projectile to the end of the barrel and the gauss pulls it. From what I've heard IRL rail guns are better at launching smaller projectiles faster but gauss rifles are better for larger ones but have more limited peak velocity.

Your crazy, but I am even more crazy. Thanks for the vid. Leona

The Timbee is mean, but far from unkillable. The Mad Dog is similar at 10t lighter for instance. And the IS decided Gauss was fun and that plasma was hilarious.

Yeah Clan Wolf is basically the Ultramarines of the Clans.

If what happened to the Banshee has taught us anything, that this thing is a white elephant to anyone that can't replace or repair all the technology that allows it to fight like at least two mechs, if not three. Without all the mass-efficient tech, it's basically an Archer.

As long as there's still 1 point of internal center torso structure left..it's fixable

Correction for you. The MC4/Savage Wolf, doesn't have 'rearward facing SRMs.' They are ATM Launchers, that switch out, between LRM/MRM & SRM Missiles. The Prime Version is what Alaric piloted for almost the entirety of the Conquest of Earth & most of his career as well. Natasha Kerensky also had them with the PPC Loadout, can't remember the version off the top of my head.

I think that if you manage to kill enough Timberwolves that you can start rebuilding one from scratch, Clan Wolf will just gift you one out of pure respect.

While there is only one canon variant of the Timber Wolf that mounted jump jets, it rightfully gained a legendary reputation, not in the hands of Clan "Best Boys" Wolf, but those of their bitter rivals, Clan Jade Falcon.

I have a Knex of this. Can we get a video on the Orion?

You should do a video of the MAD DOG/VULTURE mech!!

My favorite is the Dire Wolf or the Diashi!

I'd love to hear your take on another Clan Mech, similar niche to the Catapult but a bit more flexible. The Mad Dog aka Vulture.

Al the mega fan boys of this mech only see tonnage vs tonnage and never consider the C-bill or BV cost vs IS mechs 3 awesomes. This thing costs as much as 3 awesomes. That's 9 PPC and enough armor to build a fortress. Never Forget who won Tukkayid.

Do you have a video on the Linebacker?

Where do you find those coll images of madcat, I could not find any of them..

instead of slapping arms on a catapult why not put missile pods on a marauder?

Is the background music at the beginning from FTL? Anyway, I call it a Mad Cat cause Mech Assault and is my favorite Mech.

I will join you on that hill.The original timberwolf to me look rather silly the new one looks really cool

Timberwolf? What the fuck is a Timberwolf? Oh you mean Madcat

Night Gyr D* > Timberwolf Fight me.... * - L Pulse Laser, + Missile Ammo + M Pulse Laser.

20:28, thats som kind marauder...

was that battlezone 2 menu music i heard?

Rear facing weapons? Centurion, Quickdraw, Archer and Battlemaster would like a word with you.

The better joke would have been to keep switching between calling it a marauder and a catapault each sentence.

random little pew guns are 14.5 kord equal murder daka that can and have often killed light vehicles and elementals. also Gauss rifles are not rail guns, they are closer to coil guns, but they are a particular type of magnetic accelerator weapon.

0:32 it happens too the best of us buddy 🤣🤣🤣

I detect a hint of Spheroid bias. Could it be a Steinerboo? A Kuweebta? Bing Capelling? :P

My favorite Clan Mech. Also Myndo Waterly was a female and was Primus of Comstar.

My loadout was 2 er large, lems 10s, 4 er meds and everything else to heat sinks and armor

13:01 Just need to note all measurements in battletech are metric. So it’s 2,000 kg. Which converts to 4400 ish lbs.

Totally agree! The redesigns by all the talented illustrators+artists, do to not only the Clan mechs but also the IS mechs, well deserved justice. The machines look actually realistically functional, which Battletech was supposed to be compared to gundam, mac..gross etc. More grounded and not boxy metal noodly joke ( in looks! )machines. Only gripes I have and is personal preferance. Is fuselage/ plane bodied mechs with humanoid legs and humanoid mechs with digitigrade and chicken legs. It looks so out of place. Examples? Sagittaire for first example and Cataphract for the latter. Also Dire Raven of the Snow Raven Alliance was 🤏 close to greatness by having the mech with actual avian leg setup.. NOPE humanoid legs it got🤪 Also wish more attention to IS Omni mechs

I'll be honest with you one of the first times that I saw a madcap mark to was in MechWarrior 4 You're in a cutscene watching your cheap technician tell you about the fact that they found in a some weapons cache that was recently captured..😊 first time I took that weapon system out I freakin wrecked everything insight

*hears clan rifleman* *Laughs* The 85 tonners are a big shock

can you give author for marauder with two missile pods? I really like it

I think there was a dire wolf too or something. So long ago.

>The Greatest Clan Mech The Greatest Mech. Period. Clan Wolf, Eternal.